And a Voice to Sing With:
Lacefield, Patrick
CONFESSIONS OF A ROLE MODEL
AND A VOICE TO SING WITH
Joan Baez
Summit Books, $19.95, 378 pp.
Patrick Lacefield
I honestly can't remember when I first heard Joan Baez, her achingly pure soprano...
...Now, like the others, she draws fire from the same folks who have since moved from Maoism to Ronald Reagan and Ollie North's corner...
...Even if so much of what passed for radicalism in the sixties was ephemeral and trendy, Joan Baez never was...
...those who have stood their ground while others were changing theirs are fronting for Stalinism in Central America and naively oppose military preparedness here at home...
...In doing so she has frequently crossed figurative swords with an American left that hypocritically criticized her prominence ("Don't follow leaders," sayeth the gospel according to Bob Dylan) while asking for her money and time...
...Sixth Fleet pick up thousands of Vietnamese boat people...
...Baez's voice at a recent Carnegie Hall benefit to raise money for the anti-contra campaign in Congress sounded deeper to me and the high notes came harder...
...Patrick Lacefield I honestly can't remember when I first heard Joan Baez, her achingly pure soprano floating out across the airwaves...
...Do not disassociate yourself from other people's suffering...
...If there isn't any suffering around you, go out and find some...
...No matter...
...His books of fiction include Strange Sunlight (Texas Monthly Press) and The Graves of Famous Writers & Other Stories (Breakthrough Books...
...Role model then, role model now...
...Her travels took her from Cambodian refugee camps to Lech Walesa's side and on to stubbornly arguing disarmament with Andrei Sakharov and campaigning against Reagan's Central American follies...
...In a striking chapter, Baez describes being trapped in Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1972 - the fear and death and solidarity all around her and her own simultaneous bravery and cowardice...
...DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., is an associate editor of Commonweal and teaches at Fordham University in New York...
...Like Mike Harrington, Irving Howe, and other democratic radicals with no illusions about the nature of left-wing dictatorships, Baez drew fire from the ultra-left during the war for her lack of solidarity with the Viet Cong...
...He was one of the more honest critics...
...And a Voice to Sing With is Baez's second autobiography, the first, Daybreak, having been published in 1968...
...Perhaps a bit closer to Kahil Gibran than an honest account...
...CONFESSIONS OF A ROLE MODEL AND A VOICE TO SING WITH Joan Baez Summit Books, $19.95, 378 pp...
...She also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly...
...Even so, the politics haven't changed...
...Far from being timeless she is, once again, timely...
...PATRICK LACEFIELD is organizational director of the Democratic Socialists of America and a frequent contributor to Commonweal...
...government's ongoing hostility toward the new regime...
...pheme Perkins is professor of theology at Boston College and author of numerous books on the New Testament...
...At her recent Carnegie Hall appearance she offered some wisdom from Vietnamese Buddhism in dedicating a song to all those who suffer or have died from AIDS...
...He is the author of Facing West from California's Shores (Crossroad...
...From there Baez went on to hook up with Amnesty International and successfully petition President Carter to have the U.S...
...Rather than heed the fashion of the times or the path of least resistance, Baez seems to have taken up Davy Crockett's old motto:"Be sure you're right, then go ahead...
...PETER LASALLE is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin...
...She is, as ever, the passionate believer in Gan-dhian nonviolence, the previous sanctimony now effectively seasoned with irreverence and self-deprecating humor in her concerts and in the book...
...I don't believe in criticizing any socialist government publicly," William Kunstler stated matter-of-factly...
...Baez, however, has come as close as any to making pacifism and nonviolence seem an effective tool for social change...
...At times she has been read out of the left for her attraction to "unfashionable" causes...
...Later, when she went public with her criticisms of widespread human rights violations by the new Vietnam government, she was excoriated by many erstwhile comrades...
...She was charged with "objectively" (there's that fatal word) aiding the U.S...
...Baez herself remembers it as fickle and inconsistent...
...This is not a woman afraid to expose and, yes, even judge her weaknesses and occasional arrogance...
...It served for the moment, just as And a Voice does now...
...Before she was a pretty bourgeois pacifist, now she and REVIEWERS Paul baumann is an editorial writer for the Day in New London, Connecticut...
...In particular, she strongly identified with pacifist Buddhist elements in South Vietnam who opposed the war...
...As advice in these all-too-self-centered of times, that'll do quite nicely.ll do quite nicely...
...It was not the left's finest hour by a long shot...
Vol. 115 • February 1988 • No. 4
